Adding a generator to house supply.

[Scraggy]

Yes or the Mont Blanc Tunnel, you choose.

[Chris French]

In message , Johny B Good writes

Marketing? Trying to encourage someone to buy from you rather than another seller - maybe they got a good deal on those gennys?

There are lots of times when someone will offer a discount on a product.

On Ebay, I tend to see it as a way to encourage someone to offer on your product, with the assumption that they will end up buying yours even if the offer price is a only a little lower

It's an offer, not a bid - the seller is not bound to accept an offer.

One that makes you a cup of tea and says 'there. there, dear'?

Or more likely, one purchased from TLC.

[Johny B Good]

You're implying that CPS _aren't_ the manufacturers but simply an importer of rebadged product. You may be right about that which is an important consideration when you're hoping the company is an actual UK manufacturer able to offer a better after sales service.

On new kit, it's either a 'bulk discount' or else the product is about to be EoLed. If it's a middleman operation by a reseller, it's usually to clear out slow moving inventory.

As long as the potential customer thinks the quality is going to be on a par with similar, higher priced product, that's true enough.

It was the "25 days and 17 hours left to go" which led me to assume it was an 'auction'. I didn't bother clicking the "make an offer" link to delve any deeper.

The use of lower case does fit in with that hypothesis I suppose. :-)

The way it was tacked onto the end of the genset's useful attributes, I thought it might have been a supplied 'accessory' item.

That makes more sense. I've just googled TLC and the first and only hit points to an electrical company of that name. A quick perusal of the switches and sockets selection fails to find any suitable changeover switches. Perhaps I'd have to order a catalogue before there's any chance of tracking one down (I'm not prepared to go to that extreme just to satisfy idle curiousity).

I had to do a google search for the SDMO IPRO 3000E to find what the actual continious max power output rating. It isn't a full 3KW, it's

2.8KW but it aught to cope with a 3KW at 240v electric kettle even if it manages to supply the full 230v to the kettle (2.755KW load at 230v). When I was testing with that Aldi 2.8KVA genset, it just about managed to power a 3KW kettle by virtue of the extra volt drop in the cable taking the kettle voltage down to 221v (2.54KW). Istr the Aldi genset had a max continuous rating of 2.5KW with the 2.8KVA being the very short term peak.

The CPS unit looks more attractive with its peak of 3.5KW and max continuous of 3KW but, even at 550 quid, that's an awfully large investment for something that might only be test run 2 or 3 times a year and never get used in anger for many years to come.

If Aldi ever did get round to selling a 3KVA inverter type genset for

300 odd quid or thereabouts, I might well be tempted but, for now, it's a case of waiting for the opportunity to snatch one up at a bargain, never to be repeated price.

[tony sayer]

Try this, copy and paste if need be..

>

[Johny B Good]

Thanks for the link, Tony. That's satisfied my curiousity (£67.80 for a 125A changeover switch! ). I'm guessing you had to use the search facility to find this page. I couldn't find any links in their index page to any of this stuff.

I knew changeover switches weren't cheap which is why I modified a

63A on/off with auxiliary 10A changeover contacts for use with the ground floor ring main (10 Amp's is quite sufficient for the genset connection) along with a couple of seperate 10A changeovers for the two lighting circuits each with a 3A genset side fuse to avoid working on the unswitched side of the Wylex 6 way CU.

I'm not going for an automatic "Whole House" changeover solution so using 3 seperate switches is no great inconvenience (in fact it offers a bit of extra flexibility).

I only got as far as mounting the big switch and the surface boxes for the two lighting circuit changeover switches onto the backboard before being forced to abandon the project due the insurmountable shortcomings of that Aldi 2.8KVA genset. The project is now on hold until I can get my hands on a suitable inverter genset at the right price.

[Chris French]

In message , Johny B Good writes

Well, I was thinking in more general terms, even if it is their own product, they are still competing on ebay with other sellers of other similar generators.

Though these particular ones looked like badged products to me, even if CPS also make their own stuff.

I think the idea of 'a normal retail price' is not a straight forward thing anyway for lots of products It's more that there is a price range that a seller will have, from 'as much as I can get away with, through, what I'd like to sell it for' to 'the cheapest it's worth selling for'

If you want to get sales through Ebay or Amazon Marketplace then you may well need to price lower than when you sell direct through your own site.

'Make an Offer' listings have to have a time limit I think. Buyer makes an Offer, seller can accept or reject. Buyer may make another offer if they want.

I see Tony has reposted the link

It's never felt like a cost effective option to me (though I can see for some people living in more remote areas where interruptions to the supply might be more frequent/longer it might be different) But I don't think I've ever experienced anything more than a day at the most power loss.

We have gas for cooking, freezers will stay fine for a quite a while, and at worst food will go off and be thrown away. Chances are it will be winter anyway, so can maybe just use outside :-)

Plenty of logs for heating at least one room well. Plenty of battery torches and lamps and gas lamps and candles, and (gas and petrol stoves for back up cooking)

[Johny B Good]

====snip====

The longest outage we've ever experienced in our urban location has been less than 4 hours in duration about 30 years ago, not too long after we moved in and just after I acquired my first ever UPS, an Emmerson 30 quasi sinewave jobby using a pair of 7AH alarm batteries.

Being careful not to shut it down, I moved it to the first half landing and plugged in a lamp standard with a 13W CFL to provide lighting between the hallway and 1st floor landing and into the half landing toilet where the children sat on the loo seat to finish doing their school homework that night.

The mains had failed just before I was about to head on out to my local radioham club meeting. By the time I returned, the mains had just been restored and the XYL reported that the little UPS had kept the light powered throughout all that time (later testing with a 14W load suggests it could have kept the 13W lamp going for a good 7 hours

- it might have only been providing a "Stepped Sinewave" but at least the power conversion efficiency was somewhere on the right side of

80%).

I've amassed better UPSes since but none have ever actually been used in anger. At one point, I had a total of 5 UPSes on the go but it was costing me over 70 quid a year just in maintenance consumption alone.

When the batteries in the SmartUPS700 finally expired, I retired that little vampire (20 watts with or without a fully charged battery pack plugged in!) and ditto for an ancient UPSonic 600 which, at one point had 6 7AH alarm batteries fitted (2 banks of 36v batteries). This unit deserved to be permanently retired since it took just under 17W at its lowest and just didn't treat its batteries very well.

This left me with that old Emmerson doing duty as power backup for the Superhub, a Backups500 (single 7AH alarm battery and only 3 watts maintenance consumption) protecting the N4F box and a SmartUPS2000 providing a protected mains supply to seperate 13A sockets around the house.

The SmartUPS2000 used a battery pack made up from 4 12v SLAs (originally 17AH ones as fitted to the clip on battery case which I didn't get with the unit). I rigged this up in the basement with four cheap 36AH car batteries, along with a couple of spare banks made up with 4 x 7AH alarm batteries. Whilst the batteries were still in good condition I was able to log an autonomy of some 4 1/2 hours on a 400W load.

Unfortunately, car batteries are entirely unsuited to such continuous float charging regime (13.8v per car battery) and start to suffer increased self discharge leakage after only 6 months or so which swiftly degrades into severe battery imbalance a few months further on.

It's a problem that afflicts SLAs but, in this case, it generally takes 3 or 4 years for the first symptoms to start appearing, often resulting in the pack being totally shagged after a maximum of five years regardless of whether they'd ever been called upon to supply emergency power.

I suspect a slight reduction from the 'standard' 13.8v per battery down to 13.5v would extend the useful life somewhat (it's a compromise between sulphation effect from under voltage and corrosion effect due to excess voltage and it seems to me that the problem is excess corrosion, warranting a slight reduction of the float voltage setting to get a better balance between the "Rock and a Hard Place" those two conditions represent).

At the moment, that SmartUPS2000 is no longer providing any backup power since the last of my remaining batteries (a set of 25AH SLAs along with a bank of 7AH alarm batteries) finally expired about a year ago. I just don't have the heart to invest in yet another set of batteries knowing that they are just expensive consumables destined for recycling after as little as 4 or 5 years, if I'm that lucky.

That cheap Aldi genset would have been an ideal solution to maintain backup power for protracted periods if it hadn't been for the classic behaviour of all such genset heads in the face of even a mildly capacitive loading from the electronic kit.

It cost less than the price of a replacement battery pack from APC and I could have just stuck with a set of much cheaper 7AH SLAs to keep the system running long enough to set up and connect the emergency generator. I'd still be renewing the 7AH SLAs about every four years or so but I'd only be shelling out 50 or 60 quid instead of something like 200 odd quid for the larger capacity batteries.

Although I could hitch up a 100AH battery to the UPS and get an endurance time in the region of 8 to 9 hours on a 400W load, it's a bloody expensive consumable to keep shelling out on every 4 or 5 years. Also, for longer outages than that, once the battery has discharged, no more standby power. Adding a cheap emergency genset into the mix makes far greater sense. It's just a great pity that your ordinary common or garden genset just isn't able to cope with such loads. :-(

Well, when all's said and done, I _could_ manage without emergency power provided the outage doesn't extend beyond 5 or 6 hours for the sake of the fridge or 24/48 hours for the sake of the chest freezer.

However, I do have a few UPSes to save the day but only to bridge the gap between noting the power outage and getting the emergency genset running and connected (when and if I finally get my hands on a suitable inverter genset at the right price).

We have a gas hob which also makes a very effective kitchen dining room heater as well as three gas fires, two of which are style over function affairs (they still provide heating, but not very efficiently), along with gas CH & HW but only provided I can supply a modest 100 watts or so for the pump and controller).

UK governments have been dragging their heels over deciding on a realistic energy policy for over half a century now which means we could see rolling blackouts and loss of gas supply if we have to face another really severe winter.

I'd be less nervous about this possibility if I had a suitable emergency generator to keep a few more of the 'luxuries' going. I suppose I could make CPS an offer on their 750 quid genset and see if they'll bite (just an idle thought right now - I need to do some more research into CPS before committing myself).

[News]

In message , tony sayer writes

Let me say first that I do not have a generator, and have no plans to buy one. Reading Tony's paragraph above, I can quite see that one would not want mains power feeding the generator, or the generator feeding power out beyond the house.

So, in the event of a power cut, why not just turn off the incoming mains before starting the generator, and then stop the generator before turning the mains on again? In other words, if the main switch stops power coming in, why wouldn't it stop power going out? Yes, I'm ignoring earthing issues for simplicity.

[Tim Watts]

Because it's not implicitly safe. One day someone will start up the generator without disengaging the main supply switch. This will be day mains has failed because your service cable got chopped in half by a road gang outside.

It's always the most unlikley *never can happen* combinations of circumstances that cause accidents - read some of the railway RAIB reports...

[tony sayer]

In article , News scribeth thus

Because people being the way they are and prone to faults in the logic can let the genny be connected to the mains incoming hence the interlocked changeover switch..

[Scraggy]

A very public "Thank you" for your help mate. I sit here, a fully equipped power station. Cold beer, CH, light and a roast dinner. Do your worst national grid.

[ARW]

They will. I believe that if it is a cold winter then there is very big chance things will go tit's up.

You'll need a shotgun to keep the neighbours away when they get desperate and venture out of their houses after 48 hours without a working TV.

[DerbyBorn]

"Rod Speed" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Remind me - How many homes can a wind turbine not power when there is no wind?

[Windmill]

Especially when nearing the end of the football season.